Tarnation

Filmmaker Jonathan Caouette had a daydream as a youngster of turning his life into a musical. It's certainly a life rich with dramatic possibility: The son of a former child model, Renee Leblanc, whose parents subjected her to electroshock therapy (and may have driven her mad as a result) and a traveling salesman named Steven Caouette, who had no idea he'd gotten Jonathan's mother pregnant, Jonathan spent time as a small child in Texas' foster-care system, where, the movie tells us, he suffered intense physical and emotional abuse.

Growing up gay in Texas cannot be an easy proposition, and to see Caouette's early home movies is to get a taste of his emotional turmoil -- and his sassy talent. In one video, dressed as a white-trash, beaten wife, an eleven-year-old Jonathan offers a "testimonial" about spousal abuse that far transcends satire or mimickry; his jittery eyes and reflexive hiding behind fluttery hands give an impression that Jonathan had seen such "testimonials" for himself, maybe a little too close up. In another bit, the screen splits into four windows, one of which gives us Jonathan, in clumsy drag, lip-synching to the song "Frank Mills" from the "Hair" movie soundtrack, while the other three flash through puzzling, intriguing, sometimes alarming, images (young Jonathan interviewed on local news TV, talking about being "evacuated"; blurry images with a voice declaring, "He molested me!"; perhaps most disturbing, footage from a film version of "The Little Prince"). There must be stories upon stories behind those bits of home video and tape-recorded confidences, but the film stays firmly on track, exploring the effects of crude mental health care on Caouette's mother and the bitter resonances that trickle into his own life.

At age 13, Jonathan started sneaking into gay clubs disguised as a female goth. He got into hard music and underground film. The impact these forays had on Caouette's musical tastes has clearly stuck; the production boasts a perfectly judged selection of old songs that illustrates Caouette's emotional states. (In a burst of pure genius, Jonathan and his high school boyfriend mount a musical stage adaptation of the David Lynch movie "Blue Velvet" as told with selections from Maryanne Faithful's catalogue of work.) The video bug had already bitten Caouette by this point, and he carried on with his small dramatic projects, casting his own grandmother, Rosemary, in a few roles ("The Goddamn Whore," "Rosemary Davis, Rosemary Davis").

After so many years in front of Jonathan's inquisitive camera, one might think that his family would have resigned themselves to the inevitable: that one day, Jonathan would delve deeper, using his camera as an archaeological instrument, unearthing complicated family history and the charged emotions that go with them. But his mother is unwilling to commit her stories to film; she walks out of the room, as Jonathan calls after her that she tells him these horror stories all day long, so why not now? And when Jonathan points his camera at his grandfather, Adolph, and asks why Adolph and Rosemary subjected their daughter to so many years of electroshock therapy, he meets a wall of determined insistence: "We are a happy family! A wonderful family! And we love God!"

The early years of Renee's life -- and Jonathan's -- are heavy on text and still photos, but as the film progresses Jonathan's own video work steadily takes over more of the storytelling. At the very beginning, and toward the end, there are touches of premeditated, staged footage -- Caouette's boyfriend comes home and wakes Caouette at the film's start; talking on the phone about his mother's lithium overdose and hearing how serious it is, Caouette takes on a stricken look, gazing right into the camera -- but these artifices serve only to frame a grueling canvas full of processed, carefully edited content. There is no question that the filmmaker's pain, confusion, and anger are real; what one wonders about is the mental process that allowed Caouette to both participate in his life and film it as it happened. As it turns out, Caouette suffers from a mental disorder that "depersonalizes" him and causes him to experience his own life as though from a remove: in a way, Caouette's entire life must be like a movie to him, even as he lives it

Certain parts of the story are not included in Caouette's narrative. At one point Jonathan gets his parents both into one room; how did he establish contact with his long-missing father? The clip in which Jonathan talks about his neighborhood being "evacuated" crops up again, but no mention is made of what precipitated the event. A hurricane? An earthquake? A violent crime? And what about that cry of, "He molested me!"? Is this Jonathan's cry? His mother makes similar claims that even Jonathan dismisses as the result of her delusions -- but how far do the mother's swings into madness bleed over into her son's experience? Indeed, the mother and the son seem to be mirrored Rorschach blots of one another, two interlocked and psychedelically pulsating figures that can only belong together. This is a cryptic movie, from a narrative point of view, but it possesses a striking emotional integrity and an intense magnetism, as though Caouette had discovered a way to cut and paste himself a soul out of all those old home movies, a universe of hazy pixels in which to pour his wandering sense of self. It's no wonder that this movie seems to breathe and stare back at you: in some way, it is not merely a document of Caouette's life, it is Caouette up on the screen.